Wanna buy the ghost of the Balinese Room?

According to real estate broker Ray Allison, Scott Arnold is selling the rights to the submerged land where the Balinese Room stood for decades on the Galveston Seawall, before Hurricane Ike decided it would look better as a heap of wood on the street and scattered into the Gulf Of Mexico.

Arnold posted this statement about the club just days after Ike left Galveston in shambles.

The historic Balinese was a swanky nightclub and gambling den for high rollers, where headliners — then some of the biggest names in show business — played during the 1940s and ’50s. It was a long, narrow structure stretching out over the Gulf of Mexico, with its front door on the Seawall. The fine food, excellent service and lavish decor combined with top entertainers and gambling to attract the wealthiest Houstonians.

This was when some called Galveston the “Sin City of The South.”

The ghost of the Balinese is now listed with an asking price of $500,000, which will get you some 27,000 square feet of space and 140 feet of Seawall frontage, according to Allison, who is also helping Arnold sell an office building in downtown Galveston.

Arnold couldn’t be reached for comment.

From the real estate listing:

Available for Purchase, Lease or Joint Venture. Rights to the Seaward parcel of submerged Land known as the former Balinese Room, where a structure with a foot print of up to 27,000 sf could be rebuilt over the Gulf of Mexico, with a 140 feet of street frontage on the Seawall. Current rules would allow for a 2 level structure, all building is subject to approval.

“He’s not desperate to sell, but he thinks it is time to sell,” said Allison of Arnold’s intentions.

Allison says that anyone who wants to buy the land and build something will have a hard row to hoe, or swim, as it were. Millions of dollars would be needed to make the land up to snuff to Galveston building code standards post-Ike.

The land is controlled by the Texas General Land Office.

“Anything you want to build will need to be approved by the Army Corps of Engineers, the city of Galveston, the state of Texas, and anyone else who will feel they need to sign off on such development,” said Allison.

Allison added that he has let Tilman Fertitta, of the Landry’s empire know that the land is up for sale.

I hope that someone buys this and opens the restaurant as it once was. I actually had the opportunity to visit the place and eat there back in the 80′s when it was still the Balinese Room. The pics on the walls were amazing to see as a lot of big names visited the place back in the day. That being said, shortly before the storm took it, it was not exactly the best place in Galveston to visit.
If it is sold to the Landry’s clan, then they will probably just turn it into a carnival ride. If this is the case, then it is better off in the water and a memory.

When I was just a child of the early ‘50s, my parents treated themselves every once in a while to a trip to Galveston from Freeport (where we lived) to enjoy an evening of a gourmet dinner and dancing at the Balinese Room on the pier out over the water.
They danced to the big bands like the Dorseys, etc., with singers like Vaughn Monroe, Peggy Lee, and many of the crooners whose records and albums were high on the charts.
Somewhere in that period, the island was cleared of gambling by the James Commission.
I guess I was 10 or 12 years old when, one morning, as I read the headlines, I asked my father, “Daddy, what’s a slot machine?”
I read that they were dumping slot machines they had collected from gambling dens in the area and using them to build land fill on the beaches at West Galveston Bay.
So it was interesting to see the deputy taking an axe to pinball machines in 1957.
As I remember it, those raids happened several years earlier in that decade.
I hope they rebuild the Balinese Room and bring in some good live entertainment.

It would be amazing to have someone buy and purchase it and turn it into the NEW BALINESE CLUB….. But I would prefer Landry’s Corp NOT do it.. I do not want some horrible chain restaurant built there where I gotta pay $15 to park and endure some horrible Joe’s Crab Shack food.

Oh how amazing it would be to have the first legalized Galveston Casino there but HAH…. Yeah that will never happen in Texas unless Jesus himself comes down and tells the anointed Gov Goodhair that it is OK for Christians to gamble

It would be great if someone could rebuild it as it was, including the trap door in the kitchen where guests jumped through when the Texas rangers would raid the place.
I had a friend who, back in the day, used to frequent the Balinese Room, she told me about the trap door. Lucky for her she never had to use it.
Tillman is the only person with enough money to burn to accomplish this task.

When the Balinese room was first built, it was made out on a pier in order to get away from the law, the regulations, the city codes, etc. Today, you’d have to not only deal with City and its codes, but also the Texas folks who don’t like anything built on beaches, the Army Corp. of Engineers (who depending on who is handling your case could be competent or incompetent), the feds, the health dept (if you serve food), the TABC, the locals who are for/against everything, various religious groups against all sin, etc.

There isn’t enough money in the world that would make me want to grease all those palms, just to try to replicate a building that stood for “escaping the rulebook” once upon a time. That world is gone forever. The only way you could do something like that today would be a large boat outside the territorial waters and run a skiff back and forth to it. Such a thing would certainly be cheaper to run than building a building on a beach in Texas… unless you are a politician who has land on the beach further north, that is.